Random bleak statement or Russian literature?

Are you a strapping young academic, confident in your ability to identify an excerpt of Russian literature vs. an entirely made-up bleak statement? Take our (surprisingly quite difficult) quiz to find out:

1. “In those rare moments when Arthur Siromakha was not occupied with the struggle for existence, when he was not making an effort to please the authorities or to work, when he relaxed his constant leopard-like tension, he became a wilted young man with a slim body, the face of a worn-out actor and gray cloudy-blue eyes, moist with apparent sadness.”

Answer: This is an actual quote from Russian literature: “The First Circle” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Ch. 76 pp. 476.

2. “Sasha found it more and more difficult to continue onwards. The cold was biting, biting in the way that only a true wolf of the true Russian arctic can bite, with teeth as frigid as they are sharp and blood-stained as they are hungry.”

Answer: This is an entirely made-up, excessively bleak quote.

3. “The mowed wilderness smelled of grass that had died and the dampness of barren places, making more palpable the general sorrow of life and the vain melancholy of meaninglessness. Voshchev was even willing to do without the meaning of existence, but he wished at least to observe it in the substance of the body of another, neighboring man.”

4. “The only salvation possible for a man comes from finding whatever knowledge there is, at the end, beyond the droning din of the city, that interminable moaning that comes from carriages creaking, apartments crumbling and children wailing in the streets. Out there, in the villages, only there may a man claw apart and scrape together an existence that means something to someone, to the only person that will ever or will ever be able to care about him: himself.”

Answer: This also is an entirely made-up, excessively bleak quote.

5. “His last sheep had died the day before. Dmitrii’s sheep, the Makarich family’s sole source of income, had died, on the first day of winter. Only more cold days would arrive in the coming months, cold days that would demand warmth, food and shelter. These were things that Dmitrii knew he could no longer provide; all he would be able to provide would be a dead, useless sheep.”

Answer: This is an entirely made-up, excessively bleak quote.

6. “But when they looked closely at Katerina Ivanovna, they saw that she had not injured herself against the stone wall at all, as Sonya thought, but that the blood staining the pavement was flowing through her mouth from her chest.”

Answer: This is an actual quote from Russian literature, describing the death by tuberculosis of the widow Katerina Ivanovnaafter her children have abandoned her: “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky Ch. 5 pp. 432.

Answer: This is obviously an actual quote from Russian literature, can’t you see the Cyrillic alphabet? You’re more hopeless than Dmitrii in the winter with his dead sheep: “In the Cemetery” by Anton Chekov Ch. 1 pp. 3.